The Star Trek Transporter For Transformative Change

Your company needs to make a change. A big, honkin’ transformative change.

You need to (metaphorically) go from point A (where you are now) to point X (where you’ve decided you want to get to).

What you wish existed is a Star Trek Transporter for your entire team.

You all get into the transporter and poof, you’re magically, um, transported to where you need to be and you have implemented the change you seek.

Sadly, such a thing does not exist (Elon, if you’re listening, we need this!)

As it turns out, change is scary, hard…and often messy. Unlike transporters which are scary, easy…and sometimes messy.

But there’s some good news.

Actually deciding that you need to get from A to X is actually a pretty big accomplishment. Knowing what change you need to make may not be “half the battle” (I’m dubious of round fractions like 50% anyways). But, it’s not nothing. It’s helpful to know what battle you’re fighting.

OK, since you can’t magically transport from A to X what can you do?

You can plot your course and you can start down the path. You can build some momentum with some quick wins.

You may not be able to connect the dots directly from A to X, but you can connect to an intermediate dot, which I will expectedly call “B”.

The other good news is that in most cases, even though you don’t get all the benefits of getting to Point X (your desired state) you usually do get partial credit. Things are marginally better than they were before.

But the bigger benefit to just starting down the path to the change you seek is that it signals to the team that you actually want to make the change. And that’s not nothing.

Because faced with a big honkin’ change, a common reaction is to either

1) rethink whether you really want to make that change (change is scary!) or

2) defer until you have the time/bandwidth to implement the full change.

Many a would-be transformative change die in the tyranny of indecision and inaction.

So, like many things in life, business and software development, it’s useful to break a big thing down into smaller pieces — and tackle the smaller pieces.

If that feels like an obvious observation, it’s because it is. But I often have to remind myself of the obvious things.